Paul Krugman vs. David Brooks
Paul engages in a battle of wits with what appears to be a remarkably poorly-armed man:
The One Percent Versus the Twenty Percent: The good folks at EPI are upset by my colleague David Brooks’s claims that the gap between the top 20 and the bottom 30, not the gap between the top 1 and everyone else, is what really matters…. [I]t might be useful to have a calm discussion of what someone might mean by saying that the rise of the top 1 percent isn’t important.
One thing such a person might mean is that it’s unimportant in quantitative, dollars and cents terms. But this is just false…. [T]he rise of the top 1 percent has absorbed a large fraction (almost half, by my reckoning), of economic growth, leaving a much smaller pie for everyone else….
Now, David doesn’t focus on any of these things; instead, he talks about the “social gap.”… [But] social mores are not on the policy agenda; taxes and spending are. And if you ask how the parties differ — how the GOP agenda differs from the Democratic agenda — it’s all about the top 1 percent versus everyone else…. [T]he actual policy agenda of American conservatives serves the interests of Mitt Romney, not the Bobos. Maybe you think they should have a different agenda, but the fact is that they don’t.
And I guess I’d say that the attempts to shout down discussion of the 1 percent are in large part an attempt to distract our attention from that fact.
